Work

Labor, Effort, Sweat, Practice

Quotes for Those that Love Gardens, Gardening, and the Green Way

Compiled by Karen and Mike Garofalo

"When the sun rises, I go to work.
When the sun goes down I take my rest,
I dig the well from which I drink,
I farm the soil which yields my food,
I share creation, Kings can do no more."
- Chinese Proverb

"No occupation is so delightful to me
as the culture of the earth,
no culture comparable to that of the garden ...
But though an old man, I am but a young gardener."
- Thomas Jefferson, Garden Book, 1811

"The gardener's work is never at end; it
begins with the year, and continues
to the next: he prepares the ground, and then he sows it; after that he plants,
and then he gathers the fruits...."
- John Evelyn, Kalendarium Hortense, 1706

"Gardening requires lots of water -
most of it in the form of perspiration."
- Lou Erickson

"Man was not made to rust out in
idleness. A degree of
exercise is as necessary for the preservation of health,
both of body and mind, as his daily food. And what
exercise is more fitting, or more appropriate of one who
is in the decline of life, than that of superintending a
well-ordered garden? What more enlivens the sinking
mind? What is more conducive to a long life?"
- Joseph Breck

"What will I do when I can no longer
dig?"
- Knute Hamson, Growth of the Soil

"Each small task of everyday life is
part
of the total harmony of the universe."
- St. Theresa of Lisieux

"The one small garden of a free
gardener was all his need and due,
not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the
hands of others to command."
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Sam
Gamgee

"The artist is nothing without the
gift,
but the gift is nothing without work."
- Emile Zola

"These are the hands whose sturdy
labor brings
The peasant's food, the golden pomp of kings;
This is the page whose letters shall be seen,
Changed by the sun to words of living green;
This is the scholar whose immortal pen
Spells the first lesson hunger taught to men;
These are the lines that heaven-commanded Toil
Shows on his deed, - the charter of the soil!"
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Ploughman, 1809 -
1894

"No race can prosper
until it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem."
- Booker T. Washington

"Early to bed, early to rise,
Work like hell: fertilize."
- Emily Whaley, Charleston, N.C.

"Believe in yourself, your neighbors,
your work,
your ultimate attainment of more complete happiness.
It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the
Spring, who reaps a harvest in Autumn."
- B. C. Forbes

"Gardeners are - let's face it -
control freaks. Who else would
willingly spend his leisure hours wresting weeds out of the ground,
blithely making life or death decisions about living beings, moving
earth from here to there, changing the course of waterways? The
more one thinks about it, the odder it seems; this compulsion to
remake a little corner of the planet according to some plan or vision."
- Abby Adams, What is a Garden Anyway

"Monotony is the law of nature. Look at
the monotonous manner in which the sun rises.
The monotony of necessary occupations is exhilarating and life-giving."
- Mahatma Gandhi

"Gardening
is something you learn by doing — and by making mistakes.... Like cooking, gardening is a constant process of experimentation, repeating the successes and throwing out the failures."
- Carol Stocker

"So, yes, I do experience a
type of reverie as a gardener. But it is not something I control or strive for. When I find spirituality in my
garden, it seems to go hand in hand with hard work and diligence. Like a
burst of sunshine on a cloudy day, a feeling of peace will come over me and
grab me by surprise. I don't really know why or how it
happens. But then again, I wouldn't want it any other way."
- Fran
Sorin

"It is better to wear out than to rust
out."
- Bishop Richard Cumberland

"Any garden demands as much of its
maker as he has to give. But I do not need
to tell you, if you are a gardener, that not other undertaking will give as great
a return for the amount of effort put into it."
- Elizabeth Lawrence

"The order of things
should be somewhat reversed; the seventh day should be man's day of toil and the other six his sabbath of the affections and the soul--in which to range this widespread
garden and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of nature."
- Henry David Thoreau

"In his garden every
man may be his own artist without apology or explanation. Each within his green enclosure is a creator, and no two shall reach the same conclusion; nor shall we, any
more than other creative workers, be ever wholly satisfied with our accomplishment. Ever a season ahead of us floats the vision of perfection and herein lies its perennial charm."
- Louise Beebe Wilder

"Every kind of work can be a pleasure. Even simple household tasks can
be an opportunity to exercise and expand our caring, our effectiveness, our
responsiveness. As we respond with caring and vision to all work, we
develop our capacity to respond fully to all of life. Every action generates
positive energy which can be shared with others. These qualities of caring
and responsiveness are the greatest gift we can offer."
- Tarthang Tulku

"There are two kinds of people, those
who do the work and those
who take the credit. Try to be in the first group;
there is less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi

"The plants arrive,
usually on a day that is either raining or requires one's presence elsewhere, work perhaps. Plant orders do not arrive on
sunny, warm Saturday mornings.
- Steve Hatch

"Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a
pencil
and you're a thousand miles from the corn field."
- Dwight David Eisenhower

"No ray of sunshine is ever lost, but
the green which it awakens
into existence needs time to sprout, and it is not always granted
for the sower to see the harvest. All work that is worth
anything is done in faith."
- Albert Schweitzer

"There can be no other occupation like
gardening in which, if you were to
creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling."
- Mirabel Osler

"I'm struck by the insidious,
computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular
activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. The transfer is not paying
off. Sure, muscles
are unreliable, but they represent several million years of accumulated finesse."
- Brian Eno, musician and composer, Wired 1/99, p. 176

"There is dignity in work only when it
is work freely accepted."
- Albert Camus

"For me, a garden is
peace of mind. It immediately takes my mind off the thing I'm puzzling about in my work and gives me repose."
- Henry Louis Gates Jr.

"My green thumb came only as a result
of the mistakes
I made while learning to see things from the
plant's point of view."
- H. Fred Ale

"Happiness is possible only when one
is busy. The body must toil, the mind
must be occupied, and the heart must be satisfied. Those who do good
as opportunity offers are sowing seed all the time,
and they need not doubt the harvest."
- Apples of Gold

"When I go into my garden with a
spade, and dig a bed,
I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover
that I have been defrauding myself all this time in
letting others do for me what I should have done
with my own hands."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The way of cultivation is not easy.
He who plants a garden plants happiness".
- Author Unknown

"When all is said and done, is there any more wonderful sight,
any moment when man's reason is nearer to some sort of
contact with the nature of the world than the sowing of seeds,
the planting of cuttings, the transplanting of shrubs
or the grafting of slips."
- St. Augustine

"Gardening is the only unquestionably useful job."
- George Bernard Shaw

"Hold yourself responsible for a
higher standard than anybody
else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself.
Be a hard taskmaster to yourself -- and be lenient
with everybody else."
- Henry Ward Beecher

"To cultivate a garden is to walk with God."
- Christain Nestell Bovee

"Who sows a field, or trains a flower,
Or plants at tree, is more than all."
- John Greenleaf Whittier

"To have striven, to have made an effort, to
have been true to
certain ideals -- this alone is worth the struggle. We are here
to add what we can to, not to get what we can from, life."
- Sir William Osler

"I plant the seed,
You make it grow.
You send the rain,
I work the hoe."
- Author Unknown

"The great men among the ancients understood very well how to reconcile
manual labour with affairs of state, and thought it no lessening to their dignity to make
the one the recreation to the other. That indeed which seems most generally to have
employed and diverted their spare hours, was agriculture. Gideon among the Jews was
taken from threshing, as well as Cincinnatus amongst the Romans from the plough, to
command the armies of their countries ... and, as I remember, Cyrus thought gardening so
little beneath the dignity and grandeur of a throne, that he showed Xenophon a large field
of fruit trees all of his own planting ... Delving, planting,
inoculating, or any the like profitable employments would be no less a diversion than any
of the idle sports in fashion, if men could be be brought to delight in them."
- John Locke, 1632-1704

"A person who loves his or her work
Is like a plant in the right spot:
There growth is maximized
And the yield is greatest."
- Jeff Cox

"Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes at the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world."
- Edwin Markham, 1852 - 1940

The best things in life are nearest:
Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes,
flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you.
Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes,
certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life."
- Robert Louis Stevenson

"To forget how to dig the earth and to
tend the soil is to forget ourselves."
- Mahatma Gandhi"

"It does not matter how slowly you go,
as long as you do not stop."
- Confucius

"Let no one be deluded that a
knowledge of the path can
substitute for putting one foot in front of the other."
- M. C. Richards

"When your garden is finished, I hope it will
be more beautiful than you anticipated,
require less care that you had expected, and have cost only a little more than you
had planned."
- Thomas D. Church, Gardens are for People, 1955

"Hoe your ground, set out cabbages and
convey water to them in conduits."
- Saint Jerome, 410 A.D.

"As Paradise (though of God's own
Planting) was no longer Paradise than
the Man was put into it, to dress it and to keep it, so nor will our Gardens
remain long in their perfection unless they are also continually cultivated."
- John Evelyn

"No man is born into the world, whose
work
Is not born with him; there is always work,
And tools to work withal, for those who will:
And blessed are the horny hands of toil!"
- James R. Lowell, 1819 - 1891

"The work an unknown good man has done
is like a vein of water
flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green."
- Thomas Carlyle

"Blessed is he who has found his work.
Let him ask no other blessedness."
- Thomas Carlyle

"You are right," said Pangloss,
"for when man was placed in the Garden of Eden,
he was placed there ut operaretur eum, to dress it and keep it;
which proves that man was not born for idleness.
- Voltaire, Candide

"Thy leaf has perished in the green,
And while we breathe beneath the sun,
The world which credits what is done
Is cold to all that might have been."
- Alfred Tennyson, 1809 - 1892

"Hard work doesn't harm anyone,
but I do not want to take any chances."
- Author Unknown

"A vision without a task is but a
dream,
a task without a vision is drudgery,
a vision and a task
is the hope of the world."
- Found on a wall in a Church is Sussex, England, circa
1730

"A major part of successful living
lies in the ability to put first things first.
Indeed the reason most major goals are not achieved is that we
spend our time doing second things first."
- Robert J. McKain

"Then seek your job with thankfulness
and work till further orders,
If it's only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders;
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden,
You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden."
- Rudyard Kipling, 1865 - 1936, The Glory of the Garden

"Put you heart, mind, intellect and
soul even into your smallest acts.
This is the secret of success.
- Swami Sivananda

"Most people are more comfortable with
old problems than with new solutions."
- Anonymous

"The grand essentials to happiness in
this life are
something to do, something to love,
and something to hope for."
- Joseph Addison

"I have never had so many good ideas day after
day as when I work in the garden."
- John Erskine

"The true husbandman will cease from
anxiety, as the
squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will
bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with
every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce
of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind
not only his first but last fruits also."
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

"If you have built castles in the air,
your work need not be lost; that is
where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."
- Henry David Thoreau

"There
seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is
by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their neighbors. This is robbery.
The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third is by agriculture, the
only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground,
in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as reward
for his innocent life and his virtuous industry."
- Benjamin Franklin"

"If it is to be, it is up to me!"
- Author Unknown

"A thinking human, that does, is worth
fifty that just eat."
- Richard Perez, editor of Home Power magazine

"How to attract honey from the flower
of the world - that is my everyday business.
I am busy as a bee about it."
- Henry David Thoreau, Journal: August 7, 1851

"If you grow a garden you are going to
shed some sweat,
and you are going to spend some time bent over; you will
experience some aches and pains. But it is in the willingness
to accept this discomfort that we strike the most telling
blow against the power plants and what they represent."
- Wendell Berry

"The only thing that endures over time
is the 'Law of the Farm.'
You must prepare the ground, plant the seed, cultivate,
and water if you expect to reap the harvest."
- Stephen R. Cove

"You become responsible, forever, for
what you have tamed."
- Antoine De Saint-Exupery, Little Prince

"Good work is dignified.
It develops your faculties and serves your community.
Work, in this view:
makes you honest with yourself,
requires that you develop your faculties and skills,
empowers you to do what you are really good at and love to do,
connects you in a compassionate way with the outside world,
supports the philosophy of non-destructiveness and sustainability,
and integrates work with personal life and community."
- Roger Pritchard

"The man who makes no mistakes does
not usually make anything."
- Edward Phelps

"Many able Gardiners and Husbandmen are yet
Ignorant of the Reason of their Calling;
as most Artificers are of the Reason of their own Rules that govern their excellent
Workmanship. But a Naturalist and Mechanick of this sort is Master of the Reason
of both, and might be of the Practice too, if his Industry kept pace with his
Speculation;
which were every commendable; and without which he cannot be said to be a
complete Naturalist or Mechanick."
- William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude In Reflections And Maxims, 1682

"It is far easier to start something
Than it is to finish it."
- Amelia Earhart

"Sweep the garden, any size
said the roshi. Sweeping, sweeping
alone as the garden grows
large or small. Any song
sung working the garden brings
up from sand gravel soil through
straw bamboo wood and less
tangible elements Power
song for the hands Healing
song for the senses what can
and cannot be perceived
of the soul."
- Olga Broumas

"All the past we leave behind;
We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
Pioneers! O Pioneers!"
- Walt Whitman

"Callused palms and black fingernails
precede a Green Thumb.
Work - the activity that interferes with gardening.
When all the chores are done, the avid gardener will invent some new ones.
Gardening dissolves mental chatter in the sweat of bodily effort.
How can gardening be considered a "leisure time" activity?
All play and no work makes Jack a dull boy - and a pain in the neck for others.
We already live in the Garden of Eden, but we now have to work to keep it growing.
By the garden one knows the gardener.
To dig is to discover.
The toil and sweat open ourselves to fruitful possibilities.
The wise gardener knows when to stop.

"I think that most people want the
word garden to be a noun
which describes a place that you have set aside for your plants,
so that the word gardening would be a verb that describes
what you are doing when you work in your 'garden.' In my
philosophy, garden is a verb; it is what you do. And,
gardening is a noun that describes not what you
did, but what you got when you gardened."
- Tom Clothier, Gardening
Walk and Talk

"A day without work is a day without
eating."
- Pai-chang

"The best way to garden is to put on a
wide-brimmed straw hat
and some old clothes. And with a hoe in one hand and a cold
drink in the other, tell somebody else where to dig."
- Texas Bix Bender, Don't Throw in the
Trowel

"How wonderful it is that nobody need
wait a single
moment before starting to improve the world."
- Anne Frank

"Because work addiction keeps us busy,
we stay estranged from our
essential selves. An aspect of that estrangement is that we cease
asking ourselves if we are doing our right work. Are we actually
doing our true work, performing tasks or pursuing vocations that
are good for us, for our families, for the universe?"
- Diane Fassel

"The only way to get positive feelings
about yourself is to
take positive actions. Man does not live as he thinks,
he thinks as he lives."
- Rev. Vaughan Quinn

"If he does not plant the field that
was given over to him as a garden, if it be arable
land, the gardener shall pay the owner the produce of the field for the years that he let
it lie fallow, according to the product of neighboring fields, put the field in arable
condition and return it to its owner.
- Code of
Hammurabi, 1792 B.C.

"There are few gardens that can be left
alone. A few years of neglect and only the skeleton
of a garden can be traced. ... Japanese artists working with a few stones
and sand four
hundred years ago achieved strangely lasting compositions. However there, too,
but for
the hands that have piously raked the white sand into patterns and controlled the
spread of moss and lichens, little would remain."
- Russell Page, The Education of a Gardener, 1962

"Once one knows what really matters,
one ceases to be voluble.
And what does really matter? That is easy: thinking and doing,
doing and thinking - and these are the sum of all wisdom...Both
must move ever onward in life, to and fro, like breathing in and
breathing out. Whoever makes it a rule to test action by thought,
thought by action, cannot falter, and if he does, will soon find his
way back to the right road."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"True understanding is actual practice
itself."

"A mad never plant a garden larger than his wife can take care of."
- T.H. Everett

"If you see a whole- it seems that's always beautiful.
Planets, lives ... But close up a world's all dirt and rocks.
And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired,
you lose the pattern.
- Ursula K. LeGuin

"Science, or para-science, tells us
that geraniums bloom better if they
are spoken to. But a kind word every now and then is really quite
enough. Too much attention, like too much feeding, and weeding
and hoeing, inhibits and embarrasses them."
- Victoria Glendinniont

"Science, or para-science, tells us
that geraniums bloom better
if they are spoken to. But a kind word every now and then is
really quite enough. Too much attention, like too much feeding,
and weeding and hoeing, inhibits and embarrasses them."
- Victoria Glendinning, Green Words, 1986

"Those who see worldly live as an
obstacle to Dharma
see no Dharma in everyday actions; they have not discovered
that there are no everyday actions outside of Dharma."
- Zen Master Dogen

"It's easy to say no. But to say
yes, you have to
sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both
hands into life up to the elbows."
- Jean Anouilh

"What, if anything, do the infinity of
different traditional and individual ideas
of a garden have in common? They vary so much in purpose, in size, in style
and content that not even flowers, or even plants at all, can be said to be
essential. In the last analysis there is only one common factor between all
gardens, and this is the control of nature by man. Control, that is, for
aesthetic reasons... The essence is control. Without constant watchful
care a garden - any garden - rapidly returns to the state of the
country all around it."
- Hugh Johnson, The Principles of Gardening, 1979

"It is a blessed sort of work, and if
Eve had had a spade in Paradise
and known what to do with it, we should not have had all that sad
business of the apple."
- Elizabeth von Arnim, 1898

"One of the most important resources
that a garden makes
available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden
gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race."
- Wendell Berry

"Orare est laborare, laborare est
orare.
To pray is to work, to work is to pray."
- Benedictine Order Motto

"It was difficult to enjoy the trees
and flowers when I was so aware
of all that I had not yet done - pruning, weeding, transplanting, mulching,
composting, tagging. When I was doing the work myself,
I was happy, free. "
- Jay Neugeboren

"Life on a small farm
might seem primitive, but by living such a life we become able to discover the Great Path. I believe that one who
deeply respects his neighborhood and everyday world in which he lives will be shown the greatest of all worlds."
- Masanobu Fukuoka

"I used to imagine him
coming from the house, like Merlin
strolling with important gestures
through the garden
where everything grows so thickly,
where birds sing, little snakes lie
on the boughs, thinking of nothing
but their own good lives,
where petals float upward,
their colors exploding,
and trees open their moist
pages of thunder --
it has happened every summer for years.

But now I know more
about the great wheel of growth,
and decay, and rebirth,
and know my vision for a falsehood.
Now I see him coming from the house --
I see him on his knees,
cutting away the diseased, the superfluous,
coaxing the new,
knowing that the hour of fulfillment
is buried in years of patience --
yet willing to labor like that
on the mortal wheel."
- Mary Oliver, Stanley Kunitz

Over 3,800 Quotations, Poems, Sayings, Quips, One-Liners, Clichés, Quotes, and
Insights
Arranged by Over 250 Topics
Over 15 Megabytes of Text
Over 21 Million Webpages (excluding graphics) Served to Readers Around the World
From January 1, 1999 through March 1, 2011
This webpage has been online since May 2001
Compiled by Karen Garofalo
and Mike Garofalo from Red
Bluff, California
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